The protection of data has become a high priority item for most businesses. In the event of a disaster, companies must be able to access data in a timely fashion or business may grind to a halt. Additionally, companies must safeguard their data in order to comply with regulations relating to the protection of customer data. Thus, companies are making sizeable investments on data protection and data protection strategies.
A great deal of consideration is given as to what data to protect, where to store protected data, and how long data should be protected. Media containing protected data may be stored in backup devices, onsite vaults, or offsite. Administrators may need to manually keep track of where the media is stored. Alternately, media vaulting management software may be used to track limited movement of media.
Currently, vaulting management software only allows very basic vaulting policies to be set up. These policies are typically not able to fulfill the requirements for complex media vaulting schemes with multiple media movements. Additionally, the current software also does not provide the ability for an administrator to confirm that media reached the intended destination.
Another problem is the notification of offsite vendors of shipments of media. Administrators must manually notify offsite vendors of incoming media and manually request offsite vendors to send media back when the data contained on the media no longer needs to be protected. Some offsite vendors have proprietary interfaces to allow the administrator to electronically notify the vendor of incoming media or request media. However, the administrator must manually send the electronic notification and must manually incorporate the information on incoming media into the media vaulting software. Overall, the management of media vaulting may be a very time-intensive and manual process.